I was on a business trip and the passenger in a car being driven by a very aggressive driver back in early 2014. I was surfing the internet on my phone to keep me distracted from the driving and I read a story about someone they called the Pennsylvania Swiss Cheese pervert. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, there was a man pulling up to traffic lights offering money to women that would help him do nasty things to him with slices of Swiss cheese. There were pictures of a suspect sitting in a car, naked from the waist down and dangling slices of Swiss cheese in the air. In some of the reports they said this person also fit the description of someone in the area that had been reported to be on dating sites with similar interest in cheese. On the Facebook page for the town watch group for the neighborhood where he had been spotted, they referred to him as the Pennsylvania Swiss Cheese Pervert.
I thought that this would be the perfect subject for a song. It seemed like whatever I came up with would be a great companion piece for the song Tennessee Boxed Wine Enema. Doesn’t it seem to be a natural since wine and cheese go together? Anyway, I dashed of the first two verses of the song relatively quick. I needed some way to resolve his story so I checked back on-line to see if there were any updates to the story. I found out that they had arrested a man named Christopher Pagano. At the time I wrote the song, he was still only a suspect. Since then, he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 8 years of probation.
When I released Tennessee Boxed Wine Enema, I had written it quickly and released it as soon as I could to try and get it out while the story was still in the news. It has been one of my more successful music videos in part because I released it so quickly. I was hoping to do the same thing with the Ballad of the Pennsylvania Swiss Cheese Man but I wasn’t able to make it happen as quickly. So I finally released it as part of the Elvis Week album. I’m just happy to have it out there.
